Anil Dash

A Legal Precedent For Being Funny As Shit

2008-11-05T17:47:04Z

"Gollywaddles!"

Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre (no seriously, his initials are "GGG"!) aspires to the title of Most Ridiculous Person In The World today with his impressive and absurd display of intellectual dishonesty, as quoted in the New York Times article today on the Supreme Court's reconsideration of profanity on television:

“The world that the networks are asking you to adopt here today, where the networks are free to use expletives,” said Gregory G. Garre, the solicitor general, may include “the extreme example of Big Bird dropping the F-bomb on ‘Sesame Street.’ ”

It's Big Motherfuckin' Bird, people! It's Oscar the Bitch! (No Elmo.)

Additional delights in this story abound, with the image of the supreme justices throwing around all kinds of euphemisms for common expletives, and even culminating in what I sincerely hope becomes the law of the land: Any joke is okay, as long as it's sufficiently funny.

Justice John Paul Stevens suggested a novel standard for judging indecency. Is it ever appropriate to consider, he asked, “whether the particular remark was really hilarious — very, very funny?” Mr. Garre said funniness could play a part in the commission’s analysis of whether a remark was shocking, titillating or pandering. Justice Scalia jokingly summarized the new standard: “Bawdy jokes are O.K. if they are really good.”

It is a new day, people. A new day.

In Defense of Marriage

2008-10-31T03:48:52Z

Three years and one day ago, I got married. And then shortly after that, I wrote a post about getting married, which has become one of the most popular things I've ever written. If I have to be known for something, I'll definitely take that as a good representation of my work.

But one of the ideas that I didn't talk about back then was what a terrible reputation marriage has. Having had most of my impressions of marriage and weddings informed by popular culture and the examples of society around me growing up, I got a rather skewed vision of what married life is like. This is especially true because my marriage started in a way that was necessarily very different from that of my parents. (Theirs was, by western standards, an "arranged" marriage, though I wouldn't describe the situation quite so glibly.)

At any rate, here's what nobody ever told me about being married and having a wife and maintaining a marriage, based on (an admittedly rather limited, compared to long successful marriages) a great three years.

It's fun! You've got somebody you like who goes with you wherever you go, and it's someone who knows your sense of humor and what kind of food you like and what makes you laugh. BFF!
It doesn't have to be full of bullshit and drama like your single life. None of that "I don't know if this is what I really want." or "It's not you, it's me." idiocy. You're in there, you're up for the task, and things can just work smoothly every day if you let them. Awesome.
It reduces your sense of obligation. You get an instant get-out-of-jail-free card for any event or external commitment that you don't want to go to, whether for legitimate reasons or not. You can just talk about how an obligation to your spouse and family takes precedence over whatever else is going on, and any reasonable person has to concede that your absence is justified.
It's so much less work to go out. Like a lot of guys I know, I was always working when I was single. You have to be "on" all the time, obeying that compulsive curiosity of whether that latest person who walked into the room was The One. If you're like me, there was a lot of subconscious effort going into the work of always talking to the prettiest girl in the room. Now I still do it, I just bring her with me.
The Ball and Chain is for Losers. I can't emphasize this enough. Adult men I knew growing up, or stereotypical sitcom dads on TV, were always talking about how "the old lady won't let me" just go and do whatever fun thing they wanted to do. News flash: If that's your life, it's both of your faults for being lame, uncommunicative, lazy bastards. Don't settle for misery. If my wife or I want to go do something, we just let the other know, and if the other person's not up for it, no problem. If they wanna tag along, even better.
Married people are hot and getting hotter. I had never really done well, anything athletic before I got married. I'm hardly Michael Phelps now, but I am in the best shape of my life, and weigh a few pounds less than I did the day I got married. My wife is in terrific shape (if you're in or near NYC, go watch the Marathon this weekend and cheer her and her 30,000 closest friends on!) and I think we're both dressing better than we ever have. Even though I'm still very self conscious about the idea of exercising at all, I do it because it's fun and makes me feel good, not because anyone's nagging at me to get off the couch. Amazing what positive motivation can do.
You can just say "screw everybody else" sometimes. Just like you don't have to feel compelled to socialize all the time, being married means you don't have to justify your weird political beliefs or obscure hobbies or bizarre musical tastes to anybody. You've got one person who's got your back (or puts up with your eccentricities) and if some other random stranger doesn't like it, who cares?
You can have sex whenever you want. Perhaps the most pernicious and horrible thing people continually say about married life is that you either don't have a sex life or that it gets boring. Tip: If the sex sucks, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
You become less of an asshole. All the petty insecurities of the pre-adult years of your life, all the grievances you faced when your only family members you dealt with were those you were born with — those things start to fade away in a happily married life. If, as is the case for me, both partners genuinely love each other's family, you get a really great set of bonus relatives. In cases when people aren't that lucky, you at least get another sympathetic pair of ears to listen to your complaining about how crazy your family is.

The thing is, I'm not saying being married is easy, or that it's 100% fun. But it mostly is! I feel like I got hoodwinked as a single guy because I heard marriage described so often as some cross between a prison, being grounded as a misbehaving teen, and being castrated. I don't doubt that lots of people make mistakes in who they marry, and I am not trying to be a pollyanna about the very real fact that a successful marriage takes a lot of dedicated effort, or that some people just can't make it work even with their best efforts. But most marriages work, even if the people who don't get it quite right end up being a lot louder about it. And even then usually take another run at it, or a couple of runs at it, until they get it right.

That brings me to my last point. I believe in this institution, and I do believe it makes society better, if only for the simple reason that it tends to make guys like me act much less like assholes than we're inclined to be when we're single.

But just forty one years ago, my marriage may well have been illegal. As a proud and unrepentant lifelong advocate and practitioner of miscegenation, my lifestyle would have been outlawed in many states, and not recognized as legitimate even in some territories where it wasn't explicitly legal.

It is now a historical inevitability that our country will legalize marriage for all couples. Though the fight is particularly polarized right now, and we will naturally face serious setbacks on the way to civil rights for all, I believe the time is close. As we saw in the fight against interracial marriages, the forces against progress are most extreme and invested right when they realize that history is against them. Naturally, my wife and I have donated to support No on Prop 8 in California.

But my motivation isn't political in this, it's simple and personal and based on my experience as someone who is, and has been, truly in love. In the months before my wife and I got engaged, we got to see a couple who we admire and respect whisk their way up to New Paltz, to get married on the only day that they'd be able to do so. These friends of ours have a simple love that is obviously apparent to anyone who's ever met them. That they had to have such a sense of urgency, such an awareness of fleeting opportunity, around an event as momentous as their wedding day, is a blemish on the concept of marriage itself.

Fortunately, we got to take away a much better message. My wife and I saw that people we care about can get married on their own terms, that it doesn't have to be the scary, joyless institution that it's so often portrayed as. Instead, we saw a couple of our friends who have an obvious and abiding sense of humor, who helped us redefine the concept of marriage in our minds so that it could be something fun and stress-free and fulfilling. And it made us comfortable enough with the idea that we knew we were ready to get married ourselves.

It's easy to say "oh, he wants to score political points by saying a gay marriage inspired him to propose to his wife". While that description is accurate, it's not the emotional truth of what happened. What happened was that seeing a real, honest, unconventional-but-honest marriage inspired my wife and I to commit to one another, which has brought me the greatest and most lasting joy of my life. It is something I'm generally private about, a quiet victory for my own sense of justice.

But there was just a brief window in which our friends' relationship could enjoy the dignity of a simple wedding. There are those determined to shut that window again, though the effort will be futile in the long run. So I'd be remiss if I didn't take the time to point out that denying the right of marriage to any of us attacks and disrespects the institution of marriage for all of us. As it turns out, marriage is worth defending, no matter what you might see on TV.

And to my wife, happy anniversary. I like you!

What Sarah Palin Is Saying

2008-10-28T17:00:29Z

Sarah Palin has been unsurprising in her criticisms of Barack Obama's credentials and policies, fulfilling the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate being the most aggressive and pointed rhetorical attacker in a campaign. But a closer look at her deliberate use of vernacular and language reveals that she has gone far beyond any other candidate in vice presidential history in the dangerous and irresponsible implications of her attacks. She has phrased her attacks on Obama in a way that avoids accountability to the press while specifically addressing the subset of her audience who are most likely to advocate extreme actions against Obama.

I don't usually write about politics here; I leave the ugliness to those who seem to revel in it. But I think a lot about language, usually in a more lighthearted context like talking about yo mama jokes or lolcats. What's striking to me this election season, though, is that Sarah Palin has chosen to abuse her command of language so obviously without suffering any serious criticism for it thus far.

The crux of the issue is simple:

Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".
Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party's platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.
George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

Through these arguments, it becomes clear that Sarah Palin's assertions are designed not to prove that Obama is unqualified for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Rather, she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror. She has done this knowing full well that she can retain plausible deniability thanks to the ambiguity of her statements as they'll be interpreted by the media, by her detractors, and by her more reasonable supporters.

Code Switching, Oprah, and Straight Talk

Palin has been hammering home this alleged link between Obama and terrorism for weeks. And there's a deliberate intellectual dishonesty of using the plural form of "terrorist" for describing what was meant to be an allusion to William Ayers alone.

But just as telling as her assertions is the way in which she phrases them. Obama is not consorting with terrorists, in her formulation, he's palling around with them. I'm not one of those overbearing language nerds who's chiding her for using informal speech; instead, I want to point out a deliberate and telling choice of grammar that she's employed.

Linguists use the phrase "code switching" to refer to the act of using more than one language when speaking. As someone who grew up in a multilingual household, I'm intimately familiar with code-switching, and one of the most interesting traits about the practice is not merely how easy it is for people to switch language on the fly, but rather how the choice of language actually informs the meaning and the nuance of the words being said.

This gets even more pronounced if we use an expansive definition of the idea of "code switching" and include switching between dialects of the same language. Then, we can look at some familiar examples to learn from them.

For example, Oprah Winfrey is an extremely successful businesswoman, obviously well-versed in the General American or Standard American English that's the language of business in this country. But Oprah regularly and effortlessly code switches to AAVE (also known as "Black English" or, to its detractors, ebonics) on her show or in various media appearances. Though her use of the dialect is clearly sincere and authentic, it's also obviously a savvy way to stay connected to audiences with whom she wants to maintain a particular resonance or credibility. In short, code switching is an efficient way to target a particular message to a particular group without explicitly telling the world that's who you're speaking to. The context makes it obvious.

We see George W. Bush do the same thing regularly, as well. No man who has an MBA from Harvard and grew up among the most privileged families in the United States can be unaware that "smoke 'em out" isn't Standard American English. That's not to say his use of folksy sayings is merely a put-on, but rather that it's a linguistic choice he makes in some settings, and with the same goal as Oprah: He's speaking directly to a particular audience in a way that resonates with them as credible, and signifies to others that they're not the target audience for his words.

In the case of Sarah Palin, this strategy has been taken to its logical extreme. Where John McCain used the phrase "straight talk" in his 2000 campaign to represent the idea of telling the unvarnished truth, without regard to the actual grammar of the statements themselves, Palin has changed the meaning of the phrase slightly. In her formulation, "straight talk" is not so much about the clarity of the points being made, but rather a signifier of the dialect in which she is offering up her talking points.

I'm not speaking solely of the North Central American dialect, though Palin's use of what's often referred to as "the Fargo accent" is of course one of her most distinctive verbal traits. In fact, you can see her attenuate how pronounced that accent is based on where and when she's speaking; In front of large crowds in rural areas it tends to be pretty strong, and when she's on TV with an interviewer (or on Saturday Night Live), she dials it back. Those attenuations are normal, and any of us who've ever done any public speaking in different circumstances know that we adapt our language to the audience we're addressing.

Others have criticized Palin for her language. I have no interest in taking her to task over the fact that many of her statements lack a clear structure or that she often reverts to rambling, run-on sentences. The truth is, coherent, cogent public speaking, especially trying to tailor one's speech to sound bites, is a difficult skill that must be practiced. I don't fault Palin for not being expert at it yet, and in fact even when her syntax is tortured, the general point she's trying to make is often still very clear.

Rather, the most dramatic technique in Sarah Palin's speeches is the use of vernacular to mask the seriousness of an assertion. Sarah Palin cloaks her ideas in "straight talk" to avoid them being subject to fact-checking that would happen if she were to use standard english to make the same points.

Saying It Plainly

Put simply, if Palin says "Barack Obama consorts with terrorists", she is making the assertion that he supports acts of violence against American citizens and the media will refute this obviously false assertion. If, instead, Palin says he "pals around with terrorists", she's used code-switching to mask the seriousness of the charge, obfuscating her meaning enough to get away with making an assertion that inevitably calls for the imprisonment or even assassination of a political opponent.

This clever use of language only hides Palin's meaning from members of the press. Because writers for traditional media are usually highly educated and pride themselves on their mastery of Standard American English, they can often look down on dialects like AAVE and North Central English. Instead these forms of language being seen as legitimate and interpreted in the social context where they've formed, they're dismissed as being the words of "people who don't even speak proper English!" In the cases where the ideas aren't outright dismissed, there is still rampant misinterpretation of meaning: Reporters wrongly see a term like "palling" as imprecise, when compared to a word like "consorting".

But these words are not imprecise to their intended audience. They are, in fact, clearer than using legalistic terms like "consorting". They amplify the urgency of the statements, and increase the sense for Palin's audience that they're on the same page with her, speaking a language too "plain", too full of "straight talk", for the press to understand. And they're right. Palin has consistently pitted herself against the media, depicting them as hostile and foreign to her campaign, and thus making it even less likely they'd take her less formal-sounding charges seriously.

On top of this, by deliberately omitting the word "domestic" as a descriptor of "terrorist" after its initial mention in her speeches, Palin has amplified the recurring theme of "otherness" that the McCain campaign and its surrogates have pinned on Obama. There is an unequivocal attempt to assign a commonality of purpose and intent between Obama, his supporters and campaigners, and terrorists who would attack Americans.

This is especially telling because "domestic terrorism" hasn't been raised, by Sarah Palin or anyone else, as an issue that the McCain campaign is genuinely concerned about. There has been no mention of Joel Henry Hinrichs, or Jim David Adkisson, or even Timothy McVeigh. There is not a single mention of domestic terror on the McCain campaign website except in reference to William Ayers. So it's impossible to assert that Palin is introducing this term to raise the issue of security for Americans; It exists only in the context of attacking Obama and inciting a specifically targeted subset of her audience to see him as deserving of imprisonment or violence.

I firmly believe that Sarah Palin is a smart, talented public speaker who makes deliberate choices about her use of language to elicit particular responses from different segments of her audience. She's college-educated and has been a professional broadcaster, understanding the nuances of addressing a large audience. She is certainly experienced enough to understand that signifiers like "hockey mom" and "Joe Six Pack" are explicitly communicating to an audience that is white, overwhelmingly not college educated, and lives in rural or suburban areas.

I know because I've been part of that audience. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white part of rural and suburban Pennsylvania, the very same place that many of these attacks are being leveled. I was coincidentally in Greensboro, North Carolina on the same day that Palin first talked about "Real America". I don't have a college education, and I've spent a lot of time around highly-educated professional writers working for the biggest media organizations in the world, and seen their attitudes about language, dialect and vernacular within our country. I've done enough public speaking myself to understand how important word choice, and use of slang, and choice of accent is when speaking to different groups. And it's obvious to anyone who knows American culture why Palin wouldn't identify as a "basketball mom" or talk about "Joe Forty Ounce". These things are not accidents.

So we see a simple pattern emerge:

George W. Bush uses informal language like "smoke 'em out" when referring to targeting terrorists, setting the precedent of such terms being not only appropriate for the conversation, but in fact binding as policy.
Bush, Palin and the Republican Party keep most media outlets on the defensive by consistently distancing the media with both fair assertions of bias and unfair attacks on the journalistic imperative to act as a check to political power.
Palin sets a tone from her very first national speech where her deliberate use of vernacular explicitly connects her to rural white Americans.
Palin defines Obama as linked to terrorism, ignoring the actual issue of domestic terrorism in favor of a context which is most likely to inspire radical elements of her audience to pursue the Bush policy of striking at friends of terrorists before they have attacked.
Palin presses the argument using language that the mainstream press cannot grasp firmly enough to refute or highlight as incendiary.

I believe the vast majority of supporters of the campaign of John McCain are honorable, honest, well-intentioned and sincere Americans who want what's best for this country. And I believe that all of us, regardless of party affiliation or political support, deserve better than someone who cynically twists language to inflame and incite the very worst elements of our culture. That's why it's important to point out the danger of these actions.

Sarah Palin's conduct has gone far past the bounds of decency, and far past even the most dangerous efforts of any previous candidate for such high office. This is an inexcusable, unforgivable, and unacceptable transgression and my belief is that she should be removed from consideration for the office of Vice President for her dangerous, unethical and unamerican display of irresponsibility.

Yo Mama's So Fat...

2008-10-22T19:36:26Z

I've long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it'd be fun to throw out some "Yo mama" snaps themed around this year's election on my Twitter account:

Things took off pretty quickly from there. Lore Sjoberg (you remember him from Brunching Shuttlecocks and his writing for Wired) picked up the meme and ran with it. His were some of the first, and funniest responses:

Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as "Those Ones."
Yo mama so fat, she got an endorsement from General Mills. (I would have gone with Colonel Sanders here; That's why Lore is a genius!)
Yo mama so fat, her other biography is called "The Audacity of Hardee's

Around the same time, a number of other fantastically funny folks joined in the fun:

Fernando Rizo offers up "yo mama's such a ho, she said she'd sit ON Ahmedinejad with no preconditions"
Matt Haughey added "yo mama so ugly, the RNC spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup"
One of my personal favorites, Guillermo Esteves absolutely slayed me with "yo momma’s so fat, John McCain looked into her eyes and saw three letters: KFC." Absurd, obscure, specific — perfect!

As these were taking off, Xeni Jardin, who was dropping some snaps of her own, featured the thread in progress in a post on BoingBoing. Fun! The comments there have lit up with more suggestions, and a Twitter search for other replies now offers up, well, dozens more. I've marked a lot of the best as my favorites on Twitter.

While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.

Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.

A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.

And best of all, even if it is just a bunch of jokes on Twitter, making these jokes is something that anyone can take a turn with. Just like your mama.

Actions Are The Body Language

2008-10-16T19:00:31Z

If the words I write in these blog posts are my acts of speech, then the trail of actions I leave around the web must be the body language that accompanies them. So I made a page to capture what I'm doing around the web.

If you read my blog in HTML (as opposed to via the feeds), you've probably seen a short version of this on my sidebar. Now, I'm not supposing that all of this information is of interest to everyone reading this site. And in fact, there have been some pretty good essays written about how some of these more trivial updates can be perceived:

We'll finish up with Anil Dash's blog. Anil has been blogging for a long time and he places a prime importance on good, clear, effective, writing. His articles are always a great read. Most of one of his sidebars, however, is filled with a neverending Action Stream that only kills the freshness of his blog. Perhaps Anil is playing along by employing the Plugin on this site -- there's a lot of peer pressure to Twitter and Action Stream if your friends are doing it -- but I somehow expected Anil to be above that sort of verneration of dead deeds.

I appreciate David's kind words about my blogging there, but disagree strenuously with his conclusion about sharing one's actions online. As he notes, I do have a dog in this fight — I'm an unabashed advocate of the efforts my coworkers have put into technologies like Action Streams. But I support it because of its ability to capture the many actions we perform online, not despite that fact.

Part of it is that I know some people with whom I have a real personal connection do read my site, and may well find it interesting to see which YouTube videos I've marked as favorites. If you read this site years ago when I had my Daily Links blog, you might well be the kind of person who appreciates that.

It's just as significant from a technical perspective, though, that the most useful types of metadata are those which are captured passively. If you let people tag and share things themselves, you have to deal with spam and inaccurate data and any matter of other social complexity. But look at the data that's automatically captured, like when Microsoft Word tracks the number of times you've saved a document, or when Facebook lets people know who you've added as friends. That data is captured on the fly, and thus tends to be accurate and useful while requiring very little effort on your part to share.

I think that's a promising new area of sharing data online, and I think it's key that this kind of data is shared using open standards. But ultimately, I think the highest goal is that we enable more nuanced, complex communications online, where we don't just have our spoken words, but also the body language and gestures and facial expressions that inform those.

Words should be accompanied by actions. So now mine are. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Burying The Lede

2008-10-05T03:19:14Z

I think one of the biggest reasons many great writers go into journalism is for the chance to sneak little wisecracks in, with the hope their editors will indulge. I took the opportunity to read a printed copy of the New York Times the other day, and spotted a gem in this local story on Michael Bloomberg striving for a third term as mayor of New York City:

Mr. Bloomberg, a former Wall Street trader who founded Bloomberg L.P., a financial information firm, was sought out by the press as a financial guru. He appeared on “Meet the Press” and was not shy about commenting during public events about his interactions with the central players in the financial drama, whether it was Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. (Mr. Bloomberg calls him Hank) or Richard S. Fuld Jr., Lehman’s chairman and chief executive (Dick, of course).

Hank! Dick!

I Am Telling You This

2008-09-29T18:44:38Z

As always, I am trying to be everywhere at once. Here's where I've succeeded:

Dan Costa at PC Magazine offers a look at the rise of micro social networks. I get a nod there, but it's more satisfying to see the idea itself take off. That's an idea that Chris and I revisited at the BlogWorld conference last week, along with a discussion of blogging becoming an industry.
There's a pleasantly inexplicable passing mention of me in reference to the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York. In case it's not been clear in the past, I am delighted that the tech industry in NYC is closely linked to other industries like media and finance. It gives us a useful perspective and makes tech companies in NYC wiser and less prone to falling into the echo chamber that frustrates me about a lot of Silicon Valley companies. And I never liked the name "Silicon Alley" anyway.
The South Asian Journalists Association invited me to participate in the first of two conversations about the South Asian blogging community. I thought a lot of the points raised were pretty interesteing, and am a big fan of the SAJA blog, so this was a lot of fun.
The less said about this, the better. I'm looking at you, Andy.

Alan Leeds and Who Writes the Web

2008-09-22T17:39:40Z

One of the most frequent questions I get when I talk to people who are unfamiliar with social media on the web is, "Who writes all these blogs or Wikipedia? Who has the time?"

The answer, at least in this case, is me.

People who are skeptical about the web never seem to believe that we have a lot of time we could spend writing or collaborating on something original on the web. But they do understand the idea that people might be passionate and excited to write about topics they're passionate about.

So when I remembered a topic that's been an interest of mine for quite a while, I saw an opportunity to create a new Wikipedia page based on wanting to promote the work of someone whom I admire and respect, who inexplicably lacks a Wikipedia profile.

I wrote a simple page about Alan Leeds, whose role as a behind-the-scenes force in the popularization, promotion, and success of funk music truly can't be overstated. I admire his acumen, his taste, and the thoughfulness of his work over the years. But, as is the nature of people who work in music but aren't performers, his achievements thus far don't get enough attention outside of the respect for his work within the industry. I wouldn't argue a Wikipedia page is going to help improve that recognition, but it can help by being a useful resource for those of us who might want to make the case in the future. I have no doubt that I'm missing some of the subtle nuances that Wikipedia's moderators prefer (mostly because I don't really want to learn that much of the details of editing wikis), but the substance of the article is largely correct.

To my mind, that's a perfect motivation for the creation of a resource that people can use as a reference. Better yet, I am fairly confident I can draw the attention of friends and aquaintances who might have much more expertise about Mr. Leeds, and hopefully inspire them to point out resources or information that can improve the quality of the new page.

So, here's the brand new Wikipedia page about Alan Leeds. If you think you've got something to add, revise the article, pass along any relevant source materials, or add your voice in the comments. And if you're unfamiliar with his work, check it out — there's almost nobody else in the music business who's been so right, so many times, about the past, present and future of the funk.

Ubiquity

2008-09-15T14:09:03Z

Right now I am here, but soon I may be somewhere near you! Let's see where I've been lately, and where I'm going to be:

Across the internets, Choire asked a ridiculous question of mine to Wendy and Lisa when he interviewed them for the LA Times. Michaelangelo picked this up on Idolator, and I think my work is done here.

Absurdly, an offhand comment about Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City who likes to mock people for being "too cosmopolitan", got quoted on the Playboy blog. Did you know Playboy has a blog?

And my presentation from the Mediabistro Circus back in May is now available on video, confirming once again that it's incredibly painful to watch oneself on video.

I'm also looking forward to a bunch of upcoming events.

I'm proud to have helped out a little bit with Web 2.0 Expo New York. Frankly, we have an amazing tech scene here in NYC (Six Apart is hiring!) and we haven't done enough to get recognition for it from the tech world at large. That's why I'm quoted on the Expo site saying, "Well, it's about time." Heh.
Next weekend in Las Vegas, I'll be joining Chris Alden, our CEO at Six Apart, in a keynote presentation at Blog World Expo. If you'll be there Saturday morning, come see us, or find me at the event before or after.
Finally, next month, I'll be in Greensboro, North Carolina for ConvergeSouth. I am sure there will be many interesting things to do and see there, but my first priority is to get some barbeque. I'm sure y'all understand.

Seven is Angry, Sadly

2008-09-11T17:19:00Z

Each year, I try to write a memorial post on the anniversary, to remind myself, and as a record of where I am compared to where I was that day. As I read back over them, what I see nearly ever year is that I wanted to cling to the sadness of the day, the very real sense of grief and loss that I think colors the day for those of us who were in New York City then in a slightly different way than it did for people who were more distant.

If you could smell the smoke, I think, it was a different experience.

And as a result, I never had as much of the anger that so many others, who were more distant, felt as a reaction to the attacks. "Let's grieve first", I thought. "There will be plenty of time for being angry."

In 2002, I wrote On Being an American:

Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city.

In 2003, Two Years:

There's other people, who are consumed by their anger, unable to move forward with their lives, and determined to pick the scab and make sure it never heals. They find honor in making sure the pain never subsides, and in trying to make others hurt like they do. We have some of those, and I understand why they have to hold on to their anger. I just hope they see that it's not the best thing for them, in the long term. I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I've been so protective, I didn't want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella's Castle or something. I'm trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I'm lucky to have.

In 2004, Thinking of You:

I don't know if it's distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There's a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that "this is all going to be political debates someday" and, well, someday's already here.

In 2005, Four Years:

I was so defensive because I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn't care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn't honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2006, I wrote After Five Years, Failure, which marked the beginning of me feeling resigned to the far more cynical remembrance this day was starting to have:

[A]fter all the grief of the day, one of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it's become cliché now, there's simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.

We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

Then finally, last year, resignation with Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn't only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn't just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we'd put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I'm most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I'd turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I'd be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

Over and over, I've resisted getting angry, but this year when I first saw the Towers of Light, I finally understood that I am finally, genuinely mad. Not just at those murderous barbarians who attacked us, but at the sheer number of people who've actually stopped caring about the victims or the attacks at all, except so far as chanting "9/11" is useful to them. People who would mock the idealism and optimism that made so many of us hopeful in the days after the attacks, treating our best instincts with condescension.

Because to me, as naive as it may seem seven years later, the attacks were about hope. The hope that immediately after, people would remember the basic, decent humanity they'd shown to one another that day. Along with the memories of those lost, that's what I've tried to never forget.

I'd hoped observances would stay apolitical. I remembered seeing some of my most cynical and jaded friends moved to tears by the site of a bunch of tuneless congressmen singing hoary old patriotic songs. But the insistence of those who proclaim that they'll "Never Forget" has been used to mask the fact that we're only a few years away from footage of the attacks being used to sell pickup trucks. The thing they'll Never Forget is not the genuine grief of losing so many lives, or the inspiring hope of people putting aside their differences. Instead, they want to Never Forget that this unforgiveable violation could be used as an unassailable political bludgeon.

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don't see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I'm not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there's a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you're addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother's name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001. Every single day I walk by there and know that blowhards who only ever saw the attacks as a video loop on CNN would never dare pontificate to her about Never Forgetting.

And I get even more furious at the random meaninglessness of it all. The pathetic denoument to the Anthrax attacks is a sad, small man who was bitter about being rebuffed by a sorority girl forty years ago. The mighty and mysterious terrorist network that was going to upend our daily lives forever turned out to be, while still a persistent and real threat, just as likely to be populated with incompetent and disaffected bumblers as with criminal masterminds. If they had a goal of disrupting the American economy and reducing our standing overseas, well it's been accomplished, and yet it's not as if that's going to make the terrorists any happier. They're just differently miserable, making the whole thing seem even more pointless and unnecessary.

The thing is, it's in my nature to try to find a silver lining. I am proud that my memory of how decent people can be has not faded. I'm comforted that my vulnerability to images and feelings of that day has not muted. But finally, sadly, I'm angry that the spirit of remembrance on this day has so often been perverted on every other day of the year.

I'm not a Pollyanna — I don't expect everyone everywhere forever to bow and scrape reverently at any mention of the hallowed date. The kids at school on the next block over are too young to even really remembered what happened, and I envy them that. But I did think that perhaps this one thing that, for all its terrible tragedy, had inspired some hope could remain meaningful. It feels like there have been people continuously chipping away at that idea for years.

So I haven't given up, and I will still remember that day seven years ago for how ita display of the worst impulses of mankind turned into the best of mankind. But I don't think I can feel that untarnished hope anymore without feeling a bit angry and bitter about how some of the promise of that day has been squandered. And for that, I offer my apologies to the memory of those who died. You deserve a better honor.

I Will Cut You

2008-09-11T01:36:20Z

Last Friday was my birthday. Hooray! I have a fantastic wife, so she treated me to a pig-butchering class at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I like meat, and I like being educated about what I eat and respecting the animals I consume. So Tom Mylan was a fantastic person to lead the evening: Knowledgeable and passionate about his work as a butcher, and (as his blog demonstrates well) able to articulate that in a way that's approachable even to rank amateurs like me.

Even better, my wife posted a great writeup over on Serious Eats. There's lots more info on other Brooklyn Kitchen classes and on Tom there. And as I've mentioned before, I love displays of true competence, especially in regard to knives. And Tom has a stellar post about choosing knives which shows off exactly that kind of expertise.

There's a lot of cuts of meat in a pig, as the diagram here shows. (That's courtesy of the Wikipedia page on pork.) And if you, like me, want to see more examples of the process of breaking down a sizable animal, Adam Fields has a full photo set, and The Brooklyn Kitchen's Flickr account has a photo set on the making of head cheese. Both of those photo albums are probably not for those squeamish about butchering.

Ask The Meatman offers an Interactive Pork Chart.
Ben Trott went whole-hog as well.
Chris Cosentino butchers a pig's head — with video!

I could ramble on about this forever, but we have about 15 pounds of fresh pork in the kitchen now, so there's work to be done.

D'Angelo and the Demons of the New Minstrel Movement

2008-09-05T03:02:17Z

Spin Magazine's piece covering the rise and fall, and perhaps second rise of D'Angelo has been lingering in my mind for weeks. As you might expect, I was a fan of D'Angelo's from the start.

And that's true even though I was clowning him when he got arrested. To tell the truth, I hadn't quite realized just how far the man had fallen. If you look at the comments on my post from three years ago, you can see that even then people were saying they just wanted the man to get well so they could hear more of his work. ?uestlove articulates the challenge here better than anyone, though: "The new minstrel movement in hip-hop doesn't allow the audience to believe the artist is smart."

It's a particularly striking observation given that Spin's look at D'Angelo mentions in passing how that tension between art and commerce has affected so many of the acts I love. The world of R&B success demands either heaven or hell -- you either become a preacher and lose all of the sexiness and swagger that made you compelling in the first place. Or worse, you succumb to the demons.

While D'Angelo grew increasingly isolated, the rocky path he was traveling was, ironically enough, quite crowded with like-minded compatriots. At least three of neo-soul's other late'90s leading lights — Maxwell, [Erykah] Badu, and [Lauryn] Hill — have spent much of the new millennium on the sidelines.

Hill's struggles have been well documented: She followed her 1998 breakthrough, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with an MTV Unplugged set four years later that felt like the soundtrack to a real-time nervous breakdown. She's yet to offer a second studio album and, apart from some aborted Fugees reunions, occassional shows, and involvement with a shady guru, much of her time has apparently been devoted to her family.

Badu released her triple-platinum debut, Baduizm, in 1997 and a successful follow-up, Mama's Gun, three years later, and then said she had writer's block and went on what she dubbed "The Frustrated Artist Tour" in search of inspiration. She eked out a slight EP in 2003 but then was largely silent, until the well-received release of New AmErkykah (Pt. 1 4th World War) last February.

Maxwell's journey probably parallels D'Angelo's most closely. The Brooklyn-born singer released three platinum albums between 1996 and 2001, earning frequent comparisons to D'Angelo, then seemed to disappear entirely. A new album, Black Summers' Night, was originally slated for spring 2004 but has been delayed repeatedly. Some close to him suggest that, like D'Angelo, he's been wrestling with a rather ill-fitting public image as a sex god.

There's much, much more in the story, but it's almost impossible to overstate how much a lot of us had put our faith for the future of soul music in a small group of talented artists. A decade later, it almost seems as if no one's even trying to carry the torch anymore.

We'll see how it goes; I've got tickets to see Maxwell in concert next month, and I'm still holding out for that new D'Angelo record.

If you like music, you should own D'Angelo's Voodoo.
Maxwell is active on MySpace.
?uestlove, the heart of The Roots and the standing leader of the neo-soul movement, is a born blogger.
And Erykah's "Honey" is one of the best videos of the year:

A Pre-History of the Google Browser

2008-09-02T01:52:26Z

Today, in a surprisingly botched announcement, Google announced Chrome, their upcoming open source web browser. The subject of a Google browser is something I've opined on a few times over the years, but Jason Kottke's compiled an even more comprehensive overview of the conversations a few of us have been having for almost seven years.

If that's up your alley, you might want to check out:

Stories and Tools, which at six years old is a little dated, but offered up some thoughts on the presentation of web applications that I thought connected nicely with the Google Chrome comic book.
Google and Theory of Mind, about Google's great weakness in the insularity of the company's culture.
Google Web History - Good and Scary, which at the launch of Google's Web History feature examined some of the implications of the new tracking system.
The Circle of (Web) Life, which described a cycle of web businesses supporting each other, based on Google's support for Mozilla.
How Matt Haughey Beat Google, challenging the inevitability of Google's domination of markets by pointing out how they weren't able to compete with a self-funded, passionate person and his community.
Google Office: Google Apps for Your Domain, which put the launch of Google Apps in the context of both the office suite competition and Google's other offerings.
The Microcontent Client, an outline of ideas about the evolution of browsers and information management applications from 2002.
Finally, Google's First Mistake, my rumination on Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, a post whose accuracy has both increased and decreased in the years since I wrote it.

Me and Your Bicycle

2008-08-21T03:46:56Z

My friend Mat Honan amused and beguiled you a few months ago with Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. As is the course of such things, he got a book deal for his efforts, despite having been responsible for the onslaught of unfunny ripoffs of the site which followed his success.

But, I take some very small satisfaction in this whole thing because Mat very graciously credits me (both in the book and in conversation) with having helped spread the word about his site. It's just another in the long string of goofy web memes for which I have become an unofficial ambassador. It's a good thing there's no Hell, or surely I'd rot in it for all that I've done.

At any rate, Mat's quite an entertaining and engaging interviewee, as evidenced by his recent stint on Internet Superstar, and as there's a totally gratuitous and flattering mention of me at about the four-minute mark, I felt obliged to link to it here.

You can buy Mat's book at Amazon and other reputable booksellers near you.

Nine Years, and a New Look

2008-08-19T01:58:19Z

Last month marked the ninth anniversary of me starting this blog, more or less continuously updating since then. As I begin my tenth year here on dashes.com, I've made a few changes around the site.

First and foremost, there's a new look to the blog. My incredibly talented coworker Jim Ramsey created the basic theme, which I made a little bit uglier and naturally added some purple to. (Movable Type users can grab the Mid-Century template set upon which it's based.) I also owe a debt to Joi Ito for taking the original photo from which my little icon is based. There are more changes to come, but even at this half-complete stage, feedback is welcome.

Second, I finished something I've been meaning to do for ages, two new listings:

Both of these archives are exactly what you'd expect, with the Best Of featuring a number of my posts that I've been most proud of over the years, including some that were less popular but that I thought were worth featuring. There's also a more extensive list of all archives, organized into a calendar or by tag.

I've brought back the Action Streams that I had on the site earlier, and will be doing more to incorporate my various online presences into my site here. I don't plan to just dump my Twitter updates and my bookmarks and crap into the stream of posts here unless you folks think I should. (I'm guessing not.) There's also different ads on the site. I've experimented with a number of different advertising ideas over the years without much objection, so I'll likely continue to do so. Unsurprisingly, the ads are provided by SIx Apart Media.

I'll be doing more with giving folks the chance to vote on things on the site, as well. Coming up with my own list of my best blog posts seems a little ridiculous, even for someone who's as shameless as I am about self-promotion. I'd love to hear more from readers about what posts were interesting, or what I should write more about.

But that brings me to the most important point: Thank you! Over the years, I've seen my technical skills decline, my writing skills improve, my frequency of posting drop, and yet somehow the number of readers has consistently increased. Writing for this site is one of the most satisfying hobbies, most rewarding intellectual pursuits, and most unlikely passions that I've had in my life, and the biggest reason why is thanks to the relationships I've formed with people who've read what I write here.

So, I hope you'll take a minute or two to look over the best or at least most popular things I've written, to see if any of it strikes a chord. And I hope we're all still here having this conversation nine years from now.